Broken Days, Broken Hearts
by Esmarias
Summary: Cecelia Stoker (OC) isn't quite as clueless as her older son thinks. She only wishes she were as ignorant. Follows sometime after BrokenSleepBrokenEase. Third in my "Broken" series.


"_Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair." ~William Cowper_

**Broken Hearts, Broken Days**

Although Cecelia Stoker had only three children now, she had been pregnant nine times. Her first child had had respiratory failure shortly after birth, and the second was a miscarriage. Then she had Jonathon Carlton – whom nowadays only ever answered to JC – and Elizabeth, with a year in between them. Two years later, Cecelia delivered a stillborn child. Yet another two years later she had Michael. And a year after him, she had a daughter named Victoria who died for unknown reasons shortly before her first birthday.

And here's where things got a little complicated. Well, more so than they already were. The first seven pregnancies that Cecelia endured were not with a man named Stoker. Instead, she was married to a man named John Paul Theron. And let the record stand, that she loved this man very much. Weeks after Victoria's funeral, JP Theron was involved in a near-fatal car accident, and while he miraculously survived, he had payed a terrible price: his brain had been severely – and permanently – damaged in the crash. Cecelia recognized that her children would need a father to raise them – not an invalid. So, with no small amount of sadness, or even guilt, the woman settled her husband into a comfortable care facility before divorcing him and re-marrying herself to a man named Richard Stoker.

In order to help Cecelia's children adjust to the idea of him being their new dad, Richard offered to adopt them. However, the two eldest didn't wish to be adopted, and since Michael was too young to be a part of the discussion, only he was adopted as a Stoker, while JC and Elizabeth remained Theron's.

When Michael was three, Cecelia and Richard had their first child, Tyler. When Tyler was four, the couple were pregnant again, but unfortunately, it was another miscarriage. After that, Cecelia was strongly advised by her doctor to not try having any more children. Although saddened by this news, they heeded the doctor's warning and didn't try again.

Four years later, Tyler turned eight. A few days after his birthday, the boy drowned in a backwoods creek during a rainstorm, to which his brother Michael was a witness.

And now, merely three months after that tragic accident, the woman and her family were still mourning over their most recent loss. Every day felt broken and incomplete, like it was missing something. The house was quiet and dark, and the very air felt lonely without Tyler racing through it, barefoot, all over the house just looking for one inane thing. Even light through the windows had become grey and dim since that day. And while Cecelia tried to hide it from everyone, she was hurting. Maybe people thought that she was being strong, but it was quite the opposite. In fact, the woman could now say for certain that she was scared.

When Cecelia was a little girl, she had fallen hard on the ground when she was just learning to swing. Her mother had come over, picked her up, dusted off her dress and told her teary-eyed child that the next time she failed at something, the time she _could_ spend crying about it would be better used to get up and try again until she either broke or got it right. Well, Cecelia _had_ cried when she lost her children. She had cried _a lot_, and even now she still cried, even though some of them had been dead for many years now. Each time they died, a part of herself had seemed to die, too, along with an overwhelming sense of failure sweeping over her as the tiny caskets were lowered into the ground. But she had kept going, kept trying, because the possibility of having another child helped to ease the pain of losing the last one.

It was heartbreaking to lose a child. When she had first heard that, she never would have attributed it to physical _pain_. Well, it was. It was painful to lie in bed and breathe and cry and choke and sob and _live_ when your precious baby _couldn't_. It _hurt_ to have happy memories that could only be looked back on with sadness because you didn't get enough of them to store away. It was like every time you remembered something happy about them, you got a mental sock in the gut that both hurt as much and reminded you as to _why_ you were being made to remember. It was _painful_ to not be able to hold them in your arms. As a mother it had become reflexive for Cecelia to reach out her arms to her children. When she tried to cradle a child that she didn't want to recognize as already gone, when in the night she woke and all she could hold was empty air, when her idiot husband had gone and gotten himself hurt and couldn't be there for her when all she wanted was a pair of comforting warm arms around her and a voice whispering to _her _that it would be all right, that they would get through this one together but she didn't _want_ to get through it, she wanted her baby _back__..._ it _hurt_. And she had tried _again _and _again_, and now maybe, just maybe, she had the right to be scared. Because now – _now –_ she could finally feel herself starting to break. She could feel herself hanging onto an invisible but almost tangible edge with her fingertips, but she was slipping. Looking at Richard now was like looking down into that deep dark abyss that resided within her. It looked empty and hollow and so infinite from where she hung, and all that echoed up to her from it was all the pain she had tried for so long to hide and forget. But she soon found that the more of that pain she mashed down into that black little crevice in her heart, the fuller it became and the harder it was to keep it from reaching up with a crushing fist and pulling her down into it. Fall into that, and she knew she would never come out.

And it was so hard, trying to deal with herself and the whole rest of the family, as well. She loved her family, and wanted to take all of their pain away from them and stuff it away in a box somewhere, if she could. The only problem was, she didn't think there was anywhere left to put it without the whole weight of it crushing something or someone.

Her kids needed a mother. Her husband needed a wife. And the world needed peace, but it didn't look short in coming. Cecelia couldn't afford to break in front of them, but she didn't know how much more of this she could take – physically and emotionally.

JC wanted the suffering to be over. He wanted his parents' attention. He wanted to be responsible and take care of everything and everyone, and that was more than Cecelia could say about herself at the moment.

Elizabeth wanted her mother. She wanted to know how to cope with all that had happened. She both wanted and didn't want attention, and Cecelia didn't know what to do with her. The woman didn't _want_ to believe her eldest son's claims, but in a way, she couldn't ignore them, either.

And Michael... the sad thing about this was, she didn't _know_ what Michael wanted. He hardly spoke at all anymore, and when he did, it was mostly to his siblings. The boy frequently went days without saying anything to his mother. (Pretty much everyone had quit trying to communicate with Richard.) Did he feel guilty about Tyler's death? That was a possibility, since the boys had both been playing out in the woods together when it happened.

Cecelia had been about to go out and bring her sons back inside, herself, on account of the coming darkness and the rain. When one of them had raced into the house that evening, running into the arms of – and nearly knocking down – his mother, Mike had been soaking wet. Shaking and crying so much that his mother could hardly understand a word he was saying, the boy had somehow managed to get across to her that Tyler had fallen into the creek. Richard phoned the police while Cecelia, she was now sad to say, abandoned Michael with his siblings while she raced outside to find Ty. The police found the eight-year-old's body four hours later. When Cecelia returned to the house, three hours into the search – by insistence on her husband's part – she had found the kids in the upstairs nursery... Elizabeth was crying in the far corner of the room, JC didn't seem to know what to do with himself (sitting, standing, pacing...) and Michael was sporting a forming bruise to his jaw. Too caught up in her worry over Tyler, Cecelia neglected to comfort her children, or even ask what happened to Mike's face.

Then, and still now, she couldn't _deal_ with the kids' squabbling. She almost couldn't stand to _look_ at her husband without seeing a reflection of what was lying in patient wait for her. She was determined not to give up, but sometimes, will-power just wasn't enough. Because will-power was like adrenaline: as soon as things settle down around you, it fades pretty fast. And as soon as it's gone... you crash. It was just waiting to happen. It had happened to Richard, and there wasn't a doubt in Cecelia's mind that sooner or later, it would happen to her, too. And _that's_ why she was scared.

Because she had every reason to be.

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A/N: Due to public and private requests, I will continue this little series about the "dysfunctional family". Each will be posted one at a time, since I don't exactly trust myself to stick with a multi-chapter saga. There will be more of Mike, soon. Off-Topic: I will note that '_Broken'_ by Lifehouse helped inspire me after I started writing these. A lot of my own feelings on certain things have been inserted especially into this fic. And, as always, I do not own any of the canon _Emergency!_ characters – but I do own the original ones. Happy New Year.


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